Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2076: Invitation Into the Ship

There were bodies inside.

Or rather, what remained of them. They lay in their bunks and slumped against the walls, and some sat in chairs at the controls of the ship’s bridge, but there was nothing left of them now except bones and the tattered remains of old uniforms.

Several of the cadets looked away from the displays, and one of the girls near the front put a hand over her mouth.

The boarding team scanned the remains.

"Commander," one of them reported, "preliminary scan indicates the crew has been dead for over two hundred years."

A murmur ran through the command center.

"Two hundred?" Naysha asked. "I thought the ship was supposed to be old."

The commander turned at Naysha’s words. "Who here can tell me why it appears the victims are only so old?"

Jason slowly raised his hand.

"It’s because of Time Dilation," he said. "These older ships can’t teleport. Instead, they have to accelerate as close to the speed of light as they can. In doing so, light years pass by in seconds. It’s only when they decelerate that time starts adding up."

The commander grinned.

"Correct."

The boarding team continued through the rest of the ship and found more of the same. There was no sign of a struggle and no sign of any damage that might have killed the crew. When they reached the ship’s navigation systems, they found the answer to at least one of the questions the officers had been asking.

"The ship was placed on autopilot," the team leader said. "Whoever set it did so before the crew died. It’s been following a fixed course ever since, and it brought the ship here."

"For two thousand years," someone in the command center said softly.

Several of the officers began speculating almost at once. Some suggested that the crew had been running from something, which would explain both the autopilot and the interference signal that had masked the ship on the outpost’s sensors.

If they had been fleeing a Mekharan attack, they might have set up the interference to hide themselves from pursuit, then set a course for the nearest Federation system and hoped they would survive long enough to reach it.

They had not.

Nobody could say for certain, and the commander quickly put an end to the speculation.

"We’ll have answers once the archives are recovered," she said. "Until then, we don’t guess."

Then she turned toward the far wall, where the cadets still stood, and walked up the tiers until she was standing directly in front of Jason.

Jason straightened stiffly, as though expecting to be reprimanded.

"Cadet," Commander Ostrava said, loudly enough for the entire command center to hear. "What’s your name?"

"Jason, Commander."

"Jason." The commander held his gaze. "My officers were three minutes from firing on that ship. Every system in this room told us it was something we couldn’t identify, and half of the people sitting at those stations were certain it was an enemy. If you hadn’t spoken up when you did, we would have destroyed it."

She paused.

"There was no one alive aboard, as it turned out, but we couldn’t have known that. If there had been, you would have saved every one of them. As it is, you’ve prevented us from destroying a Federation vessel and the remains of its crew, and you’ve given us a chance to find out what happened to them." She nodded once. "Thank you, cadet. You did well."

The command center was silent.

Then, slowly, one of the officers at the communications station began to clap, and a moment later, several others joined in.

Lorna stepped forward beside the commander.

"I’ll be noting this on his record," she said. "In full."

Jason did not seem to know what to do with any of it.

He stood there with his face flushed red and his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides, looking from the commander to Lorna to the clapping officers as though waiting for someone to tell him it had all been a mistake. His mouth opened and closed several times without producing any words.

Ning stepped up beside him and clapped him firmly on the shoulder.

"Good job," he said.

Jason looked at him, and something in his expression finally relaxed. He let out a long, shaky breath and gave a small, embarrassed nod.

The cadets were dismissed shortly afterward and escorted back to their transport craft, and on the long flight back to the station, nearly everyone wanted to talk to Jason.

They asked how he had recognized the signal, how he had known which frequency to look for.

Several of the cadets who had never spoken a word to him before sat down beside him to ask questions, and one of the girls who had been near the front during the panic thanked him quietly for stopping the officers before they fired.

Jason answered every question as best he could, stammering through most of them, but he did not try to escape, and Ning noticed that he was smiling more than he had ever seen him smile.

Even Liam’s friends seemed unsure what to make of it. They kept glancing toward Jason with odd expressions, as though they could no longer remember why they had been calling him a loser.

The next day was meant to be the final day of the trip.

Before the cadets could depart for their next destination, however, word came from the defense outpost. The commander had asked for the cadets to return before they continued with the rest of their agenda.

When they arrived, Commander Ostrava met them in one of the hangars at the foot of the mountain.

"My teams spent the night going through the vessel," she said. "Every compartment has been searched and cleared, and the remains of the crew have been recovered and will be returned to Truimal for proper burial. There is no danger aboard."

She looked across the gathered cadets.

"Since it was your classmate who brought that ship in safely, I thought you might like to see what’s inside. Would you?"

Every cadet nodded at once.